Just landed in Manila today and the woeful internet speed made me
remember my time working in mainland China. In between lashings and
being force-fed propaganda cornflakes for breakfast, it was a daily
struggle to get reliable internet connectivity in our office.
pfSense
is an awesome FreeBSD-based router/firewall/swiss army knife of digital
bliss which allowed our multiple expensive, crappy aDSL lines to band
together and form one uber-line. At the time, we were using
load-balancing, meaning it would send and receive packets evenly over
each connection (or use a ratio we defined for stronger/weaker lines).
This meant that more users could be surfing porn in the office at the
same time and downloading torrents was like super fast man. There may
have been increased business benefits, too, but really, well-porned
workers are good workers is what I always say (just not out loud in
China or I would get beaten with a stick).
I may setup another pfSense box here in Manila at some point if I could find some old hardware and afford extra aDSL(ow) lines.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t really do such cheeky stuff as download torrents, I use NZBs!
